Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture

2. Explaining Tradition: On Folk and Folkoristic Logic

63 2 Explaining Tradition On Folk and Folkloristic Logic Not long after antiquarian William Thoms coined the term folklore in 1846, to spur the collection of British “manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc., of the olden time,” fellow Englishman Edwin Sidney Hartland clarified—indeed, encouraged—the professional pursuit of folklore as first the “study of tradition” and then the “science of tradition” (Thoms 1965; Hartland 1894–1896, 1968). For Thoms and Hartland, swept up in a rush toward industrial capitalism and the rule of scientific reasoning, tradition emblematized an authority and logic characterizing communal societies that stood in contrast to their modern age by being preindustrial and superstitious. Even as methods and theories changed drastically from the Victorians to the Americans, framing tradition as arising out of the contemporary interaction of postindustrial individuals, the flag of tradition continued to be waved over the territory of folklore. If that banner was not conspicuous enough, American scholar Richard Bauman declared at the end of the twentieth century, “there is no single idea more central to conceptions of folklore than tradition” (1992a, 30). An argument exists that the association of folklore with tradition gained the most ground in America (Margry and Roodenburg 2007, 262). Surveying the concepts of folklore in 1986, Elliott Oring reflected that the reformulation of folklore with reference to living tradition rather than as an anachronistic product of a caste or class of people in the United States was probably inevitable. With the absence of a peasant class or a native ancestral population (Indian tribes were native but not ancestors), and given the desire to identify a genuine, renew- 64 EXPLAINING TRADITIONS able American folklore, Oring points out that the conceptual shift from “survival” and “relic,” emphasized by Europeans, to an “oral tradition” found ready acceptance among American folklorists for their materials of recent vintage (Oring 1986, 10; see also Hofer 1984). The emphasis on transmission in the concept of tradition allowed the demotion of characteristics such as antiquity, level of society, and remoteness for Americans immersed in a progressive, supposedly classless society. In the American concept of folklore, “folklore then may crop up in any subject, any group or individual, any time, any place,” according to Mamie Harmon writing in the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1949, 400; see also Dundes 1966). During the 1970s, American updates of folkloristics as the study of folklore were frequently defined as “scientific in the study of human traditions” (Ketner 1973, 1976; Georges and Jones 1995). Surveying folklore’s study at the midway point of the twentieth century, American folklorist Stith Thompson proclaimed, “the idea of tradition is the touchstone for everything that is to be included in the term folklore” (1951, 11). Surveys of folklore studies after the 1980s showed an even greater consensus among folklorists about the emphasis on tradition than had been evident during the 1950s. Dan Ben-Amos, a leader of one of the American doctorate-granting programs in folklore, declared in 1984, “Tradition has survived criticism and remained a symbol of and for folklore” (124). At another such program, Michael Owen Jones concluded, “what appeals to folklorists is the study of traditions—something in which all people of every time and place engage” (1989, 263). This kind of tradition , which epitomizes folklore, typically highlights the processes of handing down and over (the first and second “senses” from the previous chapter), along with the characteristic repetition and variation of imaginative material in group life (the third through fifth senses). Thoms’s imaginative nineteenth-century call for “a good Saxon compound, Folklore,” only indirectly referred to tradition. He announced folklore as a replacement for “popular antiquities” or “popular literature” and located folklore in “that interesting branch of literary antiquities” (Thoms 1965, 6). He objectified tradition as an observable custom steeped in the past rather than as a process or transmission . He asked the editor of Athenaeum, “How many readers would be glad to show their gratitude for the novelties which you, from week to week, communicate to them, by forwarding to you some record of On Folk and Folkloristic Logic 65 old Time—some recollection of a now neglected custom—some fading legend, local tradition, or fragmentary ballad!” (Thoms 1965, 5). Folklore is, he wrote, “a mass of minute facts, many of which, when separately considered, appear trifling and insignificant, but, when taken in connection with the...